


Permanence

by Iambeck



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Exploration, F/M, fragments, mcwidows - Freeform, slow-burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:21:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27807481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iambeck/pseuds/Iambeck
Summary: Of whiskey and widowhood; fragments of kinship, healing and navigating whatever "it" is. Moments in time between McWidow and Grey from 17x03 onwards.
Relationships: Meredith Grey & Cormac Hayes, Meredith Grey/Cormac Hayes, merhayes - Relationship
Comments: 56
Kudos: 121





	1. Fever & Electric Fences

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, just writing this for the benefit of myself and a friend. An exploration of Hayes & Grey on an unchartered, vague timeline in fleeting, momentary fragments. No shipper wars required, thank you. Four parts in total. Welcome to part one. Heavily referenced C-19 - if you're anxious about this, maybe give this a miss.

**Permanence**

"He's more myself than I am; whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same." - Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights.

**Fever**

**_..._ **

Koracick's PPE blunder ripples throughout the hospital and for a time the camaraderie and spirit at GSM nosedives. Fighting sentiments bleed into fear and soon the staff are scrapping over reused face masks and respirators.

Bailey and Webber's ultraviolet disinfectant room is only a band-aid on disintegrating polypropylene; after Grey, the virus picks them off one by one. The wards and ORs function on a skeleton staff, buoyed by temps and students snatched from the cradle. Protocols and CDC guidelines can only bear so much under the strain of the hospital's Covid influx.

The day Hayes discovers a breach in his N95 is the day the fever starts.

It follows at the heels of an unsuccessful, thirty-five-minute resuscitation attempt on a Covid patient.

The _fifth_ call he's made in the last forty-seven hours.

"Time of death, 8:52 am."

Resentment and ire buoy underneath the surface while he signs the patient chart, only an ounce shy of launching it across the Pit in a fit of temper. Containment and promises to flatten the curve are mere political gambits three months into the outbreak, and the hospital is sinking under the strain.

"What are we doing wrong?" he scoffs in indignation, speaking to no one and everyone at the same time. He's afforded only a short, woeful shrug from one of the crash team before they begin the process of patient aftercare. No visitation. A limited funeral with a Zoom link attached. That will be this patient's ending.

"Doctor Hayes?" Nurse Bates turns to him, wide-eyed with worry.

It happens then, the detection of a small tear along the lower circumference of his breathing valve. The discovery rouses a flurry of panic and his ire strips to dismay as he traces the breach with the pad of his index finger.

_Fuck._

In all honesty, he had resolved himself to the inevitability of transmission the moment he'd handed over his replacement mask to an ICU nurse. It hadn't seemed prudent or fair to accept PPE when he wasn't the one intubating patients on the Covid front-line. Although, the pandemic had drawn him in anyway, drying up the Peds cases and stirring up a sense of duty that called him to the trenches.

Now here he is, burning up a temperature of 102.2, a jack-hammer throb firing from temple to crown. Schmidt proffers a quiet apology as the thermal scanner bleeps in consternation, cementing his removal from the Pit. He tries not to lash out in irritation, but it shows in his marching retreat and the sharp clang of the biohazard receptacle lid after he dunks his gown for incineration.

As one of the testing team jabs him with a nasal swab, his mind flits to the boys. He hasn't seen them in almost a month, in what feels like a lifetime since Andrea volunteered to put her life on pause in LA and take over his parental responsibilities. He'd left his sons climbing the walls and begging to go on the Rainier hike they'd been planning since the New Year.

 _Saturday,_ he'd promised - _work's got me running ragged, I'm knackered._

That was three Saturdays ago, back when he wasn't living at the _Hotel Executive Pacific_ and subsisting on fragments of sleep in between endless emergency pages.

He never dreamed of being _that_ shitty father, but he'd never forgive himself if he brought the virus into his home.

These are the moments when Abigail's death rears its ugly head and takes his guilt for a spin. The selfishness of on-call schedules and his surgical speciality separates him from the kids substantially more than Abigail's artistry ever could. Tack on a bout of Covid-19 isolation and his remote possibility for Father of the Year goes up in flames.

_I miss Zurich, Da._

It was almost the straw that broke the camel's back when his son dropped that bombshell on him over Facetime one idle Tuesday night. Along with a few hard shots and a wrestling match with his conscience, he'd just stopped himself shy of repacking their suitcases and jetting them back to the safe haven of Enge.

But he'd stayed. _Selfish bastard._

"Doctor Hayes?"

The room drags him back from that cesspit of self-loathing.

"- we can ask for a fast-track but the influx has set back pathology - it could be anywhere up to 48 hours before the results come through."

He knows the drill.

"Thanks, Helen," he nods, side-stepping an offering of CDC pamphlets.

He makes quick work of gathering his belongings and snags a strip of Leukoplast tape to seal the tear in his mask. Hunt passes him on the catwalk and the disbelief from behind the trauma surgeon's mask is palpable - soon there will be no one left.

"Be safe, Hayes."

"Aye," he nods, shrugging off the concern, "I'll be right as rain."

An apology is all he can offer as Hunt's pager vibrates from his hip and sends him jogging towards the ER.

All they know right now is chaos.

He hears the same rumblings from Ireland via his mother and mainland Europe from the news, but it does nothing to take the edge off the storm they're in at GSM.

The din of medical machines and overhead pages dies as he steps out into the fresh air. Free from the fluorescent, artificial light of the hospital the sharp throbbing in his temple tapers off to a dull ache. He tamps down the unease over the tell-tale symptoms and tries to mediate other possibilities - even if the pool is shallow.

Either way, rules are rules and his duty switches from curative to preventative. It's a bitter pill to swallow knowing how badly the hospital and his co-workers are being battered by the virus.

Especially Grey.

The hospital community had collapsed to its knees when the rumours of her coma had been verified. It had pissed him off. Whisperings in halls and the downtrodden stares through her treatment room window had sealed a fate for her before she'd even had the chance to fight.

_Meredith will die warm in her bed at 93._

Yang's cold comfort was the only twisted hope amongst the sea of naysayers, and not the first source of comfort he expected to relish during those tumultuous days.

For Hayes, it only solidified the notion that these people - the ones who had seen Grey's rise to surgical royalty - still underestimated her mettle and grit. Not that he _couldn't_ admit to feeling the same gravitational pull the night he'd visited Grey to rag on her choice of POA.

Only...they'd come to find a certain affinity for each other's company. An understanding, from one widow to another that the everyday person sits blind to from behind their guard rails of pity and ignorance. For damaged people like Grey and himself, they are already preset to survival mode.

He is vindicated on that front when Grey has the hospital eating their prayers within a week.

 _Atta girl,_ he'd quietly cheered from the sidelines, wary of Dr Jo's keen eye for his relationship with the general surgeon.

A smirk unfurls at the corner of his mouth at the memory of Grey's latest violation of Altman's orders. She hasn't been exactly _exemplary_ since she grumbled back into consciousness.

...

" _You could finish with the Halstead suture; don't be lazy."_

" _Did you hear something, Bokhee?" he asks the scrub nurse, eliciting a shake of her head and complicity in his theatrics._

" _No, Doctor."_

" _Only, it sounded like a patient in the gallery."_

_The intercom crackles for only a millisecond before her razor-sharp quip filters through to the OR._

" _Infection rates reduce by 7% if you use Halstead."_

" _Infection rates also reduce if the patient isolates in their hermetically sealed room."_

_She lets him think he's won, if only for a moment._

" _Infection rates_ _ **also**_ _reduce when a patient tests negative before assimilating back into the community."_

 _**Negative** _ _. Maybe now Webber and her sisters will ease up on the restrictions and her remandment._

" _Congratulations, Dr Grey," he offers with sincerity, knowing the itch she must feel to dive back into the fray. Bokhee gifts her a subtle thumbs up from his side and the world seemingly starts to tilt back in their favour._

" _Which intern is facing Altman's firing squad once they realise you're gone?"_

_There is a restrained edge to her voice and "Pollock" makes its way through the mic before she relinquishes the intercom button to stifle a coughing fit._

_The residual effects of Covid will haunt her for a while longer._

_She lingers despite her chest, eagerly anticipating his next choice of suture._

_He uses Halstead._

_..._

Now the hospital has its hands full keeping the lithe, slip of a surgeon from barrelling out of her room and into an OR. If rumours are to be believed, they'll release her soon if her oxygen saturation keeps above bar. It's the silver lining the hospital needs right now and the Grey effect sweeps the halls - an effect he's told is not entirely uncommon.

He flicks through his phone back to her last text on the way to his car.

_Break me out of here._

The two am time-stamp reeks of boredom and a part of him is tempted to aid her in The Great Escape.

But riling her up is his favourite pastime as of late.

_Take your medicine, Covid-Cathy._

His drive to the hotel takes more concentration than he anticipates. He calls Andrea and updates her on the situation, pulling out every reserve of energy he has left to assuage her fears.

_Who is looking after you? What if something happens? Do you have food? Should we tell the boys?_

It's all peripheral business until he can see and think straight again. He downs a pint of water and some Tylenol and flops against the distressed hotel bed sheets, haphazardly tossed aside from an emergent page.

The onslaught of the fever hides behind a dam until the last drop of tension evaporates from his body. Only then does it come at him like a head-on collision, eviscerating any semblance of wellbeing.

_Who is looking after you?_

Andrea's words filter through the torrent of delirium.

That never used to be a question.

Now? He doesn't know. Running away from Ireland and Switzerland leaves him with no village or home. Since Abigail's death he's walked a fine line between grieving widowhood and self-imposed exile, often to the detriment of his sons.

If not for Liam and Austin, he wonders if he'd have anyone at all.

Right now though, he has no real will to care.

Later, he'll have a vague recollection of his cell vibrating against the mattress and grimacing at the screen through the height of his fever. Whether that grimace perks to a smirk is up for debate, but he remembers the ID and the weary guffaw it draws from him.

**Grey.**

_Are you dead?_

_**...** _

**Electric Fences**

...

First days back are _lousy_.

Having survived an unprecedented amount of cataclysmic, million-to-one tragedies, Meredith knows exactly what to expect from the Welfare Brigade; short lists, paper-work and clerical board duties that are designed to keep her fifteen feet from an OR at any given time.

Like she said - _lousy_.

Non-compliance is expected from her - planned for, even - but if there is anything she's inherited from Ellis, it's the innate ability to contravene any imposition placed in her path. Three fleeting kisses to her children's foreheads at 3:47 am is the only risk she takes before slinking out of the house, a duffle bag and one of Link's energy drinks in hand.

The universe gifts her a Lap Choley and a Nissen Fundoplication before Bailey catches wind of her surgical escapades.

"Who was it?" she interrogates her former mentor, itching for but not daring enough to reach for the Albuterol inhaler in her surgical coat pocket. Helm is like a guard dog at her heels and she can feel the defensiveness emanating off her.

"Your name on the board not enough?"

 _Tracking_.

So it begins.

Despite a month out of the surgical field, the hospital is in the same state of emergency that she'd left it in the night she collapsed in the parking lot. Staffing is at an all-time low and the usual faces are far and few in between, replaced by green-gilled interns and retirees who haven't placed a central line since 2002.

Board requisitions and departmental budget sheets for the upcoming quarter keep her at bay for an hour before Helm comes barrelling into her office.

"Partial colectomy! Bay 5!"

Even she can't hide the devious triumph that carves itself into her jaw.

"Not assigned?"

Helm struggles for a breath, "no...Kar-Wilson, Kinneman and Fincher...swamped with lung resections...if you swoop in now they won't have time to work up and page Lechler."

She's out of her chair and snatching her coat from the table before Helm can blink. "We need to get the chart before someone in scut trolls the floor."

Helm's face bursts with pride, seemingly one step ahead, and produces the clipboard from behind her back.

"Remind me to nominate you for Chief Resident when you're due," she praises the resident, deftly prising the chart from Helm's hand.

To her chagrin, the emergency colectomy and in-op complications take a toll on her stamina. The residual effects of Covid ravage her reserves, resulting in each hour feeling like a ten-mile sprint. The scrub team is gracious each time she needs to break the sterile field for the Albutamol, but it's the personal sense of weakness that grates on her nerves.

_The sand isn't real, Meredith._

And then there's that.

The ghost of her dead husband infiltrating every spare chasm of thought.

She'd hoped for that to tail off after Altman pulled her off a vent, chalking it down to the barbiturates, but it lingers in her periphery throughout her recovery.

_Live for you, Meredith._

Seventeen hours later and she grudgingly admits to biting off more than she can chew. Helm's Pit theft case monopolises the rest of her day and she slips off her scrub cap under Bailey's disapproving watch.

"Go home, Meredith, before I have another attending scraping you off the floor."

Her lips flatline at the admonishment and she trudges to her office, though her mind flits elsewhere. Dead husband exhortations and the weight of exhaustion sideline for a moment as the echoes of Amelia and Maggie's teasing prick at her resolve.

 _The_ _**obnoxious Irishman** _ _saved your life._

_For someone in Peds, it took him a long time to defer to Altman._

She'd be a liar if she said the Pediatric surgeon didn't intrigue her. Well, not until _after_ he stopped peeing all over the place and asserting his authority over her domain. He'd been quick to retract his insolence when she met him toe-to-toe and for that she was glad, because behind the frank coarseness he hid a common shadow.

It was a little on-the-nose for Cristina, but somehow she'd managed to slot in a piece of something she didn't know she was missing, not until it was snatching her gallstone surgery on the Peds floor.

"Lost?"

She's brought out of her reverie by an unfamiliar nurse, presumably a temp, and shakes her head; Hayes' office is locked down for the night and any hope of snagging some of his fancy Irish whiskey to take off the edge goes down the drain.

The nurse seems to catch on.

"He's still out with the virus."

"Still?" Her tone hitches unexpectedly.

"Took another turn according to the Chief. Might not be back until next week," the nurse explains, then excuses herself as a faint alarm trills from the adjacent ward.

Now she feels like an ass. She left him on read a few days ago, a little out of something to say. It's a thing she doesn't have with anyone else, not with Maggie or Amelia, _definitely_ not Cristina or Andrew.

Something she can't put a name on, a little more than friendship, but less than a _person_ or...well, _that_.

It's whiskey drams after complicated days and widowhood without pity. When she dares to think about it she worries that she's latched onto an Alex replacement to fill a void, the next best thing after the actual thing moved to Iowa.

But that feels like a cheap excuse and she knows it.

She types it out before the overthinking takes an axe to her bravado.

_Still not dead?_

She's been doing the widow thing a little longer than Hayes has and she knows how hard it can get, juggling kids and work at the expense of your own health. Luckily, with a lot of persistence and a village effort, she'd found her people to help see her through. Sisters, strays and frat boys turned uncles - none of it would have been remotely possible without the motley crew of people that made sure the fridge was stocked and that the kids weren't sticking knives in the electrical sockets. Some might not call it _ideal_ parenting, and she's not winning any awards, but her kids are loved and safe.

Does he have people? Or is _she_ just that incompetent at being alone?

Hayes' reply comes as she traipses across the parking lot, mediating between two hotel options for essential workers on her phone.

_When they ask for my cause of death, tell them it was the sewage water that this hotel calls tea._

Whatever _it_ is or isn't, she at least owes him for the countless tokens of unreciprocated tea and whiskey offerings.

She ignores Cristina's gloating in her head.

Outside Room 204 at the _HEP_ she leaves a half-cocked attempt at a care package. It feels a little too _Izzie_ or _Maggie_ of her as she leaves the Trader Joe's chicken broth and Twinings tea behind. Her intention isn't to stay, but by the time she's there she can't be bothered to drive across town to her first choice of hotel.

She barely drops her duffel bag onto her hotel room floor before her phone illuminates again.

_Incoming Facetime: Hayes._

"You still look like crap," she insists once the hotel wifi stabilises enough to reduce the pixelation.

She's being truthful - he does look like crap and not in that post-forty-eight-hour shift kind of way. He looks like he's only a few rounds away from where she was after being admitted. A twinge of guilt stirs in her gut, but she's had her own crap, hasn't she?

Anyway, he's not her responsibility.

"Did you manage to stay awake longer than my preemie today?" he quips back, clearing his throat in the same breath.

"Big talk for someone who was already supposed to be back running his department."

"To some that might be construed as keeping tabs. Missed me, Grey?"

She rolls her eyes, "not you - your whiskey. You locked it up."

He manages a splintered chuckle only for it to be cut short by a spasmodic cough.

"Aye," he finally breathes, "to keep it safe from freeloading Americans - thanks by the way," he hitches the handle of the grocery bag into frame, "the kitchen closed after a breakout."

Her brows knit together, "so what've you been eating?"

It can't be worse than the hospital meatloaf served to her on Tuesdays and Saturdays. The smell still makes her gag when she gets a whiff in a patient room.

" _Pollo's_ on 3rd."

_Oh. Much worse._

"Slim pickings out there, Grey. Some of us don't have the luxury of being related to half the hospital staff."

She scoffs at that. "You think Amelia and Maggie can cook?"

He balks at her through the screen.

"A brain surgeon and the youngest cardio chief _can't_ cook?"

Hiding her own bewilderment is near impossible.

"None of us can. We're _surgeons_ ; we've lived off vending machine Cheetos and cafeteria pizza since we got a licence to cut."

It clicks for him then.

"So the tortellini they snuck in while you were admitted?"

" _Pinnochio's_. Giorgio has a sister-wives discount," she explains off-handedly, deliberating between two miniature spirit bottles from the mini-bar.

"Raving mad, the lot of you."

Despite her exhaustion, there is something invigorating about the conversation that drifts between them. Part of her assumes it's because she gets to talk about Derek without fear of reproach, just as he can bask in the memory of Abigail.

A lot happened to her after Derek, some of which still follows her in the hospital halls. Hell, there are still nurses and orderlies that attended to her the day she almost sank to the bottom of Elliot Bay. Hayes is the ultimate reset button, disconnected from all of that chaos and tragedy. He gets _it_ without knowing it, or at least the sordid, endless string of tragedy that prefaced and preceded Derek dying.

In some way or another, the ghosts of their spouses find their ways through the cracks, though the more time passes the less it becomes about _them_ and more about life after the fact.

Trading numbers in his office hadn't even felt like a big deal the night he managed to snag her for that drink. Hayes has an enviable way of playing things off so casually that it almost threatens her infamous predilection for indifference.

Same cloth and a whatever the rest of the phrase is.

She does little to make it known to her sisters, partially out of respect for Andrew and whatever they are now and partially because she doesn't want to validate her best-friend's onerous matchmaking. Since when had she become so _responsible?_

She shots both of her miniatures in spite of that fact.

"Bad day?" Hayes's Irish lilt softens a touch, as though he's back behind her visitation window on the ward. She affords him the ghost of a smile, barely tracing the curve of her lip.

"I should be asking you that."

"But you didn't."

"No," she relents, releasing a pent up sigh, "I didn't."

_The sand isn't real, Meredith._

"You want to talk about it?"

Does she? Nothing seems off-limits with Hayes, courtesy of their Widow Club membership. She decides she doesn't, more so out of her own sense of self-preservation and willingness to keep afloat.

"It's just _that time of year_."

He's pensive in response, but the pity doesn't flow like she's used to from the rest of her circle.

"Do you think it was harder for your sons? Being older?"

She doesn't quite know why she wants to spear him with that thorn, but he takes the hit and wrestles with it until he has an answer.

"They know exactly what they're missing. What her hugs felt like, her laugh...things that can set anyone alight with grief. But that's also the gift, they have their own versions of their mum that I don't have to build or shape for them."

His answer is like brushing up against an electric fence.

"My youngest daughter never knew Derek, she was born after he passed. She's...the one I worry about the most."

The honesty sits like silt in her throat and for a moment she can't look at the screen, half-expecting to find that elusive pity suddenly written all over his face. Part of the problem of never having known someone like herself, someone widowed so young, it's hard to believe in an even keel. Of utter, unadulterated and bone-deep understanding.

Hayes eyes her for only a moment, the clench of reticence settling along the underside of his jaw.

"It's a different kind of pain," he finally speaks, "not better or worse, just _different_."

There's a story there, a thread of something that she'll leave unpicked. She's had enough for the time being.

"Do I know you well enough now?" she changes the subject, an air of impishness drowning out the sobriety of the moment.

"For what?" he asks, confused.

"The story of the electric fence."

Her change of subject near enough gives him whiplash.

"I told you Grey...the littlest bloody things. Aye, you know me well enough - but there's a condition."

"What?"

"Just a bit of tit for tat."

She narrows her eyes, suddenly feeling defensive.

"Yang warned me about you and morphine, something about ensuring I protect your dignity."

_She didn't._

"I'm gonna kill her."

"Air restrictions might make that a bit tricky."

"You know I can hang up on you."

It's not a threat, she has - multiple times.

But she doesn't.

* * *

Hello Richard Flood/Cormac Hayes - you brought some old fans back into the fray. Kudos, mate.


	2. Cuervo & Theorem

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the wait, I was brewing up a near 7k chapter. This story is completely plotted and each twist and turn is detailed, but it still has to be written...and sometimes that process takes me to new and unfounded places. Thank you SO much to everyone who has had nice things to say about this story, I know there are only about 10 of us out here. But for you 10, know that I appreciate you. Especially now that they're cutting our main man out of episodes. What gives?
> 
> Warning: C-19 references.

**Permanence**

_"He's more myself than I am; whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same." - Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights._

**Cuervo**

...

The patients were never supposed to come to Grey-Sloan Memorial.

An act of absolute necessity forces the ambulances carrying a father and his two sons to their doors. Driven by a fit of adrenaline that spurs a bull-headed opposition to Bailey's Covid-only protocol, the paramedics refuse to re-route to City General.

_Another five miles and you'll sentence him to death._

They're the first non-Covid cases Hayes is paged for in almost three weeks. If not for the nature of his speciality he would have celebrated his relief from the Covid Pit. Instead, he clips his pager back onto the waistband of his scrubs and rallies a pediatric team to send to the ambulance bay. Hunt and his trauma junkies are already a few feet ahead as the fracas starts between intake and the paramedics.

Hunt doesn't miss a beat, assessing and overriding protocol in a matter of seconds. The trauma chief's nerve is something Hayes commends the ex-vet for, a man always willing to take a scalpel to red-tape and bureaucracy. A momentary nod of recognition and approval swings like a pendulum between them before Hayes drafts his team to take the Peds cases.

These days the sting of being the deferential surgeon is mild; he used to be that man, albeit without the military investment.

A buccaneer.

One rifle through his transfer paperwork and HR file would tell a story of extended last-chances, suspensions and reports of _insubordination_ stemming from 2017. If not for the recommendations of high-ranking figureheads like Preston Burke and Cristina Yang, he'd be spending his days relegated to a stem cell research lab. For the sake of his sons and their future, he'd promised to leave that cavalier behavior behind at Boston and Klausman.

Seattle. A new start and a clean slate.

Forget the lack of universal healthcare, the business of big pharma and asshole sales reps selling defunct and fraudulent medical tech.

Toe the line.

He does to the best of his ability, barring a few lapses with kids who vape and general surgeons who try to filch cases from under him. It hadn't been an easy transition, nor something he'd been able to easily explain away at his interview with Chief Miranda Bailey, but she'd hired him despite the evidence contrary to his purported capabilities.

_It seems we can't maintain a world-class team of staff without a stain...or four._

The effects of a broken system; anyone worth their salt comes with baggage.

His contract is signed off with the condition of a six-month probation, subject to change. Though, that isn't something he advertises around the hospital. It's nothing short of a leash to keep him at heel, but he appreciates the opportunity and the chance to bring the boys Stateside where Abigail would have wanted them.

His two boys that he can't help but see reflected in his patients that come in that day.

Eight and eleven; Tommy and Max Morris. Scrawny, chocolate-smeared lads barely a mile from soccer practice when a truck sideswipes their father's sedan. Tommy walks away with a broken radius and some lacerations, but his older brother Max is forced into an OR with a splenic rupture.

Wilson comes in for the assist, helping to stem the tidal wave of damage from the impact. He proves it there in the OR, that he's more than a red stamp of _insubordination_ in the quick deftness of his assessment and trauma technique. Even if his reputation at Klausman and Boston bears the scars of his mercurial attitude, no one can deny his talent.

Arrogant? Self-assured? It's the same whichever way you slice it.

The kids come through the other side with a smattering of sutures and scars, but nothing that can't be remedied by the promise of chocolate pudding cups and endless game console matches with the interns.

_"Kids are bionic. I've never seen a department where patients bounce back faster."_

_"Aye. They're bloody miracles."_

_"You know women would swarm your dating profile for crap like that."_

_"I thought I didn't need one, Wilson. Isn't my love-life being puppeteered by a Cardio surgeon in Enge?"_

_"I told you to forget about that. Vow of silence or whatever."_

Hunt manages to stabilize the father but not without the necessity of around-the-clock ICU care and a medically induced coma. Hayes has a hard time tracking down another parent and it's almost as if the family materializes from thin air, until Max wakes from the grog of anesthesia to explain their tragic circumstance.

_Mom died three years ago._

One swift wrecking ball to the gut.

Murky parallels become a tangible picture that he has to face every day for a week. There is no next of kin, just an elderly and infirm aunt twice removed on the other side of the country. A connection that doesn't bode well for the impending social worker appointment for Tommy and Max.

He checks in on the father before and after his shifts, a quick, PPE-clad visit to glance over the patient chart. The superficial part of him upholds the notion that it's for the benefit of the two brothers on the Peds floor, but anyone who knows of his own circumstances can interpret his intentions.

Widowed father of two; guilt-ridden kinship. One mishap on the road with the boys in the backseat and this could easily be him comatose in ICU.

Where would his sons be then?

The patient's details and obs are imprinted in his memory now.

_MVC - James Morris, 42, multiple fractures including rib, femur and left radius and ulna. Laceration of the liver, kidney perforation and an acute subdural hematoma. Three cardiac arrests and declining kidney function since admittance._

He should already be dead.

For whatever god-given reason, James holds on through the tumult. With each passing day, Tommy and Max have more questions that Hayes can't answer and inflating expectations that feel like thorns in his side. They're younger, much younger than his own had been when they'd lost Abby, and now they're teetering on the precipice of losing the only other constant in their lives.

_Dad loved Mom more than anyone. He said he's never gonna marry again, so it's just us now._

He calls Liam and Austin more during that week than at any other time since becoming a father. They ask their own questions, unused to his level of communication and presence.

_Da, you're being weird, you need to grow a pair. All we've done since last night is sleep and eat Aunt Andrea's gross meatloaf._

_I just miss you, lads._

Then, one morning, everything goes south

He walks in on Grey finishing a code on James.

"Time of death, 7:31 am."

As she rips off her gown she almost bumps into him, still railing against the code blue frenzy.

"Sorry," she murmurs resignedly, defeat settling on her shoulders at the loss.

"Don't be," he manages through the lump in his throat, "he's been circling the drain for a while."

" _Hayes_."

She says it in _that_ tone.

Word gets around, he knows that. A not-so-subtle keeping tabs in case one of their own goes off the deep end. He's sure the nurses and residents have had a lot to embellish about the poor bloke tormented by the patient in Room 23.

"Thanks for trying, Grey."

He leaves her clutching James' chart and his sudden exit stamps out any words of comfort that brew at her lips.

Of course, no one leaves Grey in the lurch, and as he sucks in the morning air outside the Pit a coffee materializes next to him.

"It's the good stuff - from the cart outside."

Despite her N95, he can still detect the edges of her smile buoyed on the curves of her cheeks. He's glad it's her of anyone; there is a fine line carved between sympathy and empathy and she has a knack for circumnavigating the right trenches.

"Thanks again," he lifts the cup in recognition, "I'll be needing it."

If he was a true bastard in his job he could have a resident break the news to the boys and wash his hands of the entire mess.

But the father in him knows better, _demands_ better.

"Have you managed to find anyone else? For the kids?"

"Nothing permanent. Only an aunt, but she's moving into a facility at the end of the month," he explains, thumbing the ridge of the plastic lid on the coffee.

"Oh," she exhales.

"Yeah."

With six feet spaced between them, the comfort is borne from her company. No grief catchphrases or recycled one-liners telling him that things will get better. Nothing gets better, they'd had that frank conversation over the _Connemara_ plucked from the third drawer in his desk. Whiskey and time are balms and salves but the ugly pockmarks of loss will serve as eternal reminders of those chapters.

Time is just an analgesic that gets better at numbing as the years roll by.

Shit like that doesn't heal.

"Just needed a reminder that the world isn't all doom and gloom," he gestures to the outside, "hits a bit too close to home, y'know?"

She nods with a sigh, nursing her own cup of coffee a little closer, "was that a first?"

"Aye," he confirms, "and as close as you can damn well get to 2017."

He tries to focus on the horizon in hopes that the melancholy will sluff off. _Stiff upper lip_ as his Ma would say. _Chin up_. He doesn't ask her the same question or interfere, he knows that she sees it a lot more in general with the elderly folk.

"I'd say you did better than me," she assesses, her tone lilting in jest.

That surprises him.

"You think?"

She smiles at him again.

"Well, you didn't trash a supply closet."

"Not been here long enough to earn the privilege," he chuckles darkly, "Linda would have my by the throat."

"Best keeping that in mind," she warns.

He wonders then, did she think about it? Did it bug her as much as it bugs him?

"Can I ask a question that you might not want to answer?"

"Sure."

No anesthesia. He likes that about her. Jump in first and ask questions later, a refreshing honesty that keeps him on his toes.

"Do you have plans for what happens to your kids if you...pass?"

She sucks in a breath. It's a bit deep for eight in the morning before the caffeine has kicked in.

"Initially it was one of Derek's sisters, but after Derek died it all fell to Alex."

"The man who dumped his wife by letter?"

"Okay, you definitely don't know me or him well enough for that judgment."

He touches a nerve. Serves him right.

"So, not Pierce or Shepherd?" he continues probing.

"My sisters...they came a lot later," she explains for the benefit of his unmasked confusion, "Alex was all I had for a long time and if push comes to shove, he'll respect my wishes for the children."

That's the advice he'd given her back when the choice was the candidate for her POA.

_Choose someone who will choose you over and over again._

"So you didn't get that far with Deluca?"

It's bold, but she's been just as bold in the past. It catches her off guard, rattles her maybe.

"No...that would be - ."

"A first?" he inputs.

"Yeah. A _first_."

He changes course for the sake of the discomfort that his line of questioning stirs.

"Abigail wanted her sister Andrea - if the time comes. She can be a little unhinged but the boys love her."

"But?" she digs, sensing his own underlying discomfort that James' case had unearthed.

It's there on the tip of his tongue, a bitter and distasteful idea. One he hasn't had to reconcile with in the two years since his wife was buried six feet under.

_Dad loved Mom more than anyone. He said he's never gonna marry again._

If James' death teaches him anything, it's that he doesn't want to be alone forever.

_You have my permission._

His hesitation lasts only a beat, a footstep taken in thick mud that needs a harder yank to free, but Grey understands.

_We'll leave it there then._

He's thankful and relieved all in the same breath, quickly pulled back into the safety of her dark humor.

"I don't think we could get away with whiskey at the start of a shift," she notes, observing her coffee a tad more lackluster than before.

The energy it takes to muster his guffaw isn't worth it, but it's a relief to feel something other than the heaviness of the morning.

"We'll be in AA at this rate," he volleys back, reveling in the reciprocation of her laugh.

"Eugh, and to tell them it was _whiskey_ ," she scoffs, screwing her face up in distaste, "what is it with men and whiskey anyway? Is there some sort of club you join on your 21st birthday? Derek drank whiskey too."

He shrugs, raising a brow at her.

"What's that saying? Don't bite the hand that feeds you?"

The eyeroll is something he's come to learn to love, a sign you've infiltrated the circle.

Fuck, he doesn't really know.

It was _one_ off-handed comment from her sister Pierce after he'd ticked off the general surgeon. _Don't be offended, that means you got away with it. She likes you._

He grapples with that while listening intently to her ramblings that sometimes veer off his context map, as though she's worked with him for ten years and not one.

_Sorry, sometimes it's hard to remember you only just got here._

She chalks it down to him knowing Yang, a name less associated by face at GSM now and more by the print in cardiac medical journals.

"Joe would be horrified to know _Jose Cuervo_ has been replaced."

"Joe?" he looks back over at her, a little out of the loop.

"He owned the bar across the street."

Sometimes, with everything going it's hard to imagine that side of her. He's seen glimpses and flashes of something over the rim of his tumbler on the fourth floor of Pediatrics, but it rarely lends itself to anything concrete.

"Now that sounds like a story, a man of many tales."

It's her turn to fumble with her coffee lid.

"Well, whichever tales he does remember aren't leaving Portland. He packed up a few years ago and took his husband up north."

"A crying shame. I'm sure he had a handful about the _venerated_ Dr Grey."

He doesn't know what he's doing, but recently it feels as though he's treading ground he hasn't shared with someone since Abby; the banter and habitual drinking that could be construed by others as fibers of flirting. So, like he often does as of late, he makes the first move to leave with the excuse of rounds.

"Got anything good today?" he asks, rerouting the conversation as they make their way back to the Pit.

"No, just a string of whipples and cole-"

He cuts her short, suddenly taken by the visitor heading towards the pit without a mask.

"Oi, where you goin', Pal?" he transitions into a jog to catch up with the unmasked male, leaving her behind, "no mask, no entry - hospital policy. You can get one from the tent over there," he points to the temporary PPE tent run by a group of interns.

He's rewarded with a hardy scowl.

"Like I told _them_ I don't need one," the man spits out, trying to side-step him to the entrance.

"Not the way it works," Hayes retorts, lowering the tenor of his voice and moving to block the sliding doors. He sees Grey out of his periphery, gingerly observing the escalating situation.

He stands his ground but the visitor interprets it as an act of aggression, earning him the reduction of a few feet of space.

" _Fuck you_! It's my freedom of choice!"

By now he's toe to toe with the visitor, one of many agitators the hospital has had to deal with since the breakout. De-escalation rarely works when it comes to a loved one wanting to see a patient, but the protection of the staff and other patients was the mandate set by Bailey.

Once security shows up it's not his problem.

"Sir, if you don't comply security will be dispatched."

The man only buckles down harder.

"You're attacking our constitutional rights! This is _America_. You're letting a goddamn hoax dictate our freedoms!"

His patience wears thin. Of _all_ the days for an anti-mask protest. These are some of the harder moments to keep composure, especially after the morning he's had.

Little by little he can feel his self-control eroding.

"Look pal, I couldn't care less. No mask, no entrance."

"I'm not your _pal_ , you _Mick_."

A twitch of ire rockets through to his fingertips and he clenches his fist to stem the burgeoning tide.

"Three feet back and you're not on hospital grounds," he warns, stepping closer.

There's something festering that he doesn't like the feel of.

 _Insubordination_.

"I want your name and your employee number," the protestor demands, edging closer.

Oh, he can have that alright.

"Doctor Cormac Hayes," he shoves his badge out, " _Pediatrics_. I work with immune-compromised _babies_ and _children_. Make sure you get that down for your deniers. They're the ones you'll be killing."

He barely misses the swinging punch thrown his way, sending the anti-masker tripping over his own feet.

"Okay, that's _enough_ ," Grey comes and sandwiches herself between them, bracketing her fingers around one of his forearms in restraint, "security is on the way."

"Grey, don't get within six feet of this Numpty," he warns, breaking the no contact rule to maneuver her out of harm's way.

The denier groans from the floor, clearly in pain after meeting the concrete.

"You're lucky she's a better person than I am," he directs his ire back at the protestor, looming over him, "she was in a coma for a week - hospital for a _month_ \- because of the _hoax_. Nearly died only to have to come back and deal with morons like you."

"Three of our nurses are _dead_ , one of the world's most respected brain surgeons is one foot in the grave. I'm in half a mind to let you in just to give you a goddamn taste of the _hoax_. There aren't any vents left so you'll be at the bottom of the pile, _pal_."

_Don't meet aggression with aggression._

" _Hayes_ ," Grey hisses at him, tugging the sleeve of his surgical coat still pinched in between her fingers.

It's a switch he can't turn off. Day in and day out they have to deal with eejits like this, making their jobs harder, making the staff feel undervalued and at risk.

"No, Mr. Big - I - Am here wanted to exercise his _rights_. Isn't that right? _Pathetic_."

Whatever his intentions are they're thwarted by the appearance of security.

"Get him a goddamn neuro consult," he orders.

Once the dust settles all he's left with is an anvil of anger.

" _Cormac_?"

It's the first time Grey uses his name since he threw it at her in a patient room. A fact he'll only remember later, once he's left her standing in the Pit entrance without so much as a goodbye.

The rest of the day pans out horribly. It swirls and settles like lead on his shoulders.

Tommy and Max are inconsolable once he breaks the news of their father. The social worker presses for an emergency foster placement, except their available contacts are already stretched and unable to take in a pair of brothers.

He owes Grey an apology for the car wreck that morning but he doesn't get the chance now that elective surgeries are back on the board. Any time he has a free moment she's holed back up in another OR or consulting. If Deluca's glare in passing on the catwalk is anything to go by, it's clear that earlier events have already been sent up the hospital pipeline.

He thinks it best to give her some breathing space.

That evening his phone stays silent and the _Connemara_ in his desk goes untouched. His only saving grace is that Bailey overlooks his antagonistic role in the morning scuffle.

_Mr. Henson got his mask. Grey saw to it._

He scoffs at that, drawing a lukewarm Miller to his lips. He's so goddamn sick of it all.

The same four hotel walls and having to parent through his phone, not to mention the slew of ungrateful members of the public who think that the hospital is aiding and abetting a political coup.

Except now he also has to reconcile with the carousel of unwanted sentiments that culminate on James' deathbed.

That he's lonely.

Admitting it is like asking for a rusty nail to the eye.

_You have my permission._

He dumps the half-drunk bottle of Millers onto the hotel desk and rubs a hand over his brow.

 _I know you think this is hilarious_ , he thinks, the echo of Abby's laughter reverberating in his mind. Of the two, he'd always been the flounderer - indecisive to a fault. But none of it matters. What he wants isn't even up for discussion when Liam and Austin are concerned.

It's enough for him to want to draw a line under the day and knock it out with a chunk of sleep. He has enough time to worry about the fragility of his feelings another day.

Beer in the trash. Alarm set.

_Knock._

He almost doesn't hear it from the bathroom as he wipes the remnants of shaving cream from his face.

Whatever his expectations are, they're nowhere in the realms of Grey in sweats and slipper socks, cradling a bottle of gold-label _Cuervo_.

"A few more before we think about AA?"

Even if a no was a remote possibility, she ducks under his arm and slides through the gap into his room anyway.

"Aye," he can't help but smirk at her boldness, pushing the door shut, "but just a few. That stuff's lethal."

She nods, folding herself into the armchair with an arm outstretched, "pass me the glasses will you?"

Bossy as the day he met her.

He hands them over and he receives a tumbler back half full.

" _Grey_!"

"You call yourself _Irish_?"

"There's _Irish_ and then there's a _liver transplant_!" he scoffs with fake incredulity.

"Don't worry, you can have some of mine, it wouldn't be the first time," she says off-handedly, now grappling with the TV remote and flicking through the channels.

A glimpse suddenly becomes a whole damn picture.

So _this_ is who she is.

_You have my permission._

...

**Theorem**

...

Distanced parenting fares about as well as a live bazooka shell in an OR, and she should know. Some days, the idea of holding a bomb in a cavity seems easier than pixelated Facetime attempts to control her kids.

"Brush your teeth, Bailey."

"Mama, no! Aunt Amelia _stinks_."

 _Thunk_.

"Amelia, put him back on the phone or else he's losing cartoon privileges."

"Bailey, listen to your Mom."

"No! You _stink_!"

"Amelia!"

 _Thunk_.

"Mer, gotta go the -,"

_The call was disconnected._

One of these days her son is going to be the death of her.

That is if Amelia doesn't murder him first.

The uptick in his recent delinquency isn't just a reflection of her own wayward genes from bygone days, but more so her recent, long-term absence from their home.

_Mama has to work, Sweetie. I can't come home because I don't want to make you sick. Or your sisters._

_But Parker's Mom works from home on her 'puter!_

The guilt is a facet of her job that she'll have to wrestle with for the rest of her life. She thumbs through the myriad of pictures sent to her from both Link and Amelia on her cell, detailing the mass destruction from Bailey's day. It's nothing akin to dying your hair pink and screwing boys on tequila, but the seeds are starting to sow, and she knows she has to get ahead of it before he's running off to Europe to spite her.

"Trouble in daycare paradise?" Jo interrupts her musing as she enters the attending's lounge, flopping onto the couch beside her.

She tilts her phone screen towards Jo and flicks through the camera roll.

"Bailey's moved on from pyrotechnics to staging a bedtime coup. Naturally, Amelia is getting homicidal."

_Mer, he shoved his tuna sandwich in Link's guitar; we didn't find it for **three** days!_

"Homicide? Who're we murdering," Hayes asks, catching the tail end of their conversation while beelining for the coffee machine with his flask.

"My seven-year-old," she confirms, baiting his composure.

"Might have to say no to that one."

"Not into murdering kids?" Jo quips.

"Don't want to lose my license," he nods, leaning against the counter while stirring his coffee, "too much student debt to throw in the towel now."

"Even for a good cause?" she challenges him, flicking back to Bailey's worst offense on her phone, "he covered the four-year-old in petroleum jelly."

Hayes cracks a wide grin, squinting at her picture of Ellis from across the room.

"Reminds me of when my boys were little, I once got a call from Abby crying down the phone in my third year of residency; she caught our oldest painting his baby brother in his own shit. You should be grateful."

Jo groans from her left, grimacing, "really selling parenthood, guys."

" _Hey_ ," she turns to her general prodigy, suddenly full of artificial exuberance, " _there's_ an upside to being dumped for an ex-wife and cancer embryos!"

She narrowly misses the medical journal that Jo lobs at her head.

Unused to the scalpels she and Wilson stick in each other it elicits a choking sound from the Peds surgeon across the room.

" _Savage_ , Grey."

"No, savagery is a 3 am wake up call because Thor's boot is being shoved in your ear canal."

If you were to ask her, Derek got the easier deal. Eternal peace and kooky one-liners on the coma beach. _Live for you, Meredith_ \- seriously?!

"Aye," Hayes confirms, "and it only gets worse once they're teenagers and they can _choose_ to hate you."

"Huh, you're right, maybe I _did_ dodge a bullet," Jo reflects smugly.

The tete-a-tete is broken by the shrill page coming from Hayes' waistband.

"That's me. Have a good day, Ladies," he nods before making his exit.

Jo doesn't miss a beat, flicking her attention back to her.

"So how is _that_ going?"

Coy is a game Meredith has played her whole life and she's not about to start winding it in now.

"How is what going?" she asks, sipping her own coffee and grimacing, _too much sugar._

"The hand-picked widow special from Switzerland?"

"Oh, him - we're getting married next week."

Jo relents with an exacerbated sigh, "you're the worst."

"Are you interested? I could slip him your number if you want."

"Nope. Got my own thing."

That intrigues her. She drops her cell back onto her lap and turns to Jo.

" _Who_?!"

"You know, I reserve that for two-way conversation."

Burned by her own gameplay.

"Fine," she relents, too intrigued for her own good, "it's...drinks and depressing widow talk. I don't know what people expect me to say."

Jo shrugs as though the whole issue is like a medium-level sudoku puzzle.

"Is he easy to talk to?"

Of course it's easy to talk to Hayes. Cards she's held close to her chest for years are suddenly spread on the table and the things that make others shy away draw him in. Though, it would be cheap for her to reduce it just to their common tragedy.

_Can I test a theory?_

But that's not how her answer comes out.

"We bond over the cons of cancer and semi-trucks."

"So you don't want to mount him?"

"I _just_ got out of a relationship," she sighs, suddenly feeling the weight of that mess being sidelined by her best friend and all of her supporters, "it's the last thing I'm looking for right now."

"That's not a no - is it the accent?"

"Jo," she deadpans, "the last time people pushed me into something, I ended up scaring away an extremely hot military doctor; now I can't show my face at Bauer."

"Okay, okay," Jo surrenders, "but no is an easy two-letter word."

Right as she's neared her inquisition limits her pager beeps from her coat pocket.

_ER, bay 2: liver lac. Susp diverticulitis. Cat E gen cons._

She's so eager to ditch the lounge she almost forgets what all the probing was for.

"Hey," she curls herself back around the jamb of the door, "who's your _thing_."

Jo's coquettishness makes her feel like a proud mama.

"Jackson."

" _No. Way_."

"Way."

One consult in the ER becomes the catalyst for a slew of emergency cases that rush her and the scrub team off their feet. Her whole department dominates the OR board, snagging every free OR that comes their way.

The pressure of being the Chief of General Surgery is her drug of choice, keeping her accountable and present in a constant whirlwind of on-call shifts and interns who don't know their head from their ass. Since the outbreak, surgery has become a battleground and there are new landmines she's learning to side-step along the way.

One of the trickier landmines is remembering to pocket her inhaler before starting a shift.

Now that they're getting a hold on the virus her workload increases, as do the hours and the time she spends hunched over a patient in an N95. Their PPE deliveries are finally stable and no one is having to share face masks, but it's a little too late for her.

Since being spared death by Covid she's had two asthma clinic appointments, two upped doses of albuterol, and upgraded to a nebulizer for the worst of her attacks. If surgery wasn't already difficult enough, having to leave the sterile field just to get her crappy lungs to function grates on her nerves.

She's _Our Lady of General Surgery_.

Not Breathless Betty.

She has no time for peep flow tests and monitoring lung function when she's deep in a patient cavity. Altman assures her that with time it might resolve, but the level of scarring left behind doesn't make it a guarantee.

That was the morning she threw a handful of bedpans across the stock room.

Some days are better than others and depending on the surgical case depends on whether she powers through.

On days like today she has no choice - step away or let the patient bleed out. Adrenaline and her respirator mask enough of her plight and she makes it to closing before passing off to a fourth-year resident. By the time she's scrubbing out it feels like she's breathing through the eye of a needle. Bokhee asks if she's okay and she brushes it off, promising she's fine.

 _Fine_.

Derek would slice her for it.

_You're always **fine**._

Unless she's hit with an incoming emergency her day is over anyway, giving her time to raid the Ventolin kits. She'll get Helm to sign off on it or whatever. Well, that was her plan until she remembers the Ventolin has been shipped off to Covid Care.

 _Goddamnit_.

It's fine, it just means a trek across the hospital to the attending's lounge where she _thinks_ she left her inhaler in her jacket pocket.

By the time she makes it to her cubby, the tightness in her chest escalates to a full-blown attack. She hasn't had one this bad since she was still hospitalized and the regret soon starts to seep in as she frantically checks her jacket pocket, coming up empty.

 _Shit_.

The nerves set in and she grasps her tote with trembling hands, fighting a surging light-headedness. How can she remember all of the useless crap in her purse but forget the one thing that might stop her from croaking in her own hospital?

It's not fair to Amelia, but all she can blame right now is the hectic call from that morning and it throwing her off-kilter. _Hand cream. Diary. Hand sanitizer._ It comes up empty and suddenly she can't find the energy to stand.

_Breathe in and out. In. Out._

Splenic ruptures and broken jaws aside, her worst fear is not being able to breathe; hyperventilating might as well be the fuel and the match for stock room panic attacks and nerve-splintering flashbacks to planes, bombs and shootings. Things that she has otherwise learned to force into deep crevices so that she can make it through the day.

_It's here. Somewhere. It has to be._

In one last-ditch effort, she tips her tote upside down and runs her fingers through the contents, ignoring the skittering of hair pins and car parking tokens across the floor.

The dizziness has her so turned around it takes her a while to register the hands on her shoulders, shaking her to attention.

"Grey?!"

_Hayes._

Her response comes out as a mere gasp for breath, hand pressed flat against her sternum.

"Where's your inhaler?!" he assesses the situation, scouring her belongings sprawled across the lounge, "did you leave it at the hotel?"

All she can manage is a weary shrug.

"Checked your coat?"

She nods, light-headed as he snatches it off the back of the couch to search it anyway.

Panic tattoos itself across his brow and it takes him a split second weighing up the next options, until she suddenly feels his arms under her knees.

_It's alright. I got you. I'm here._

The world doesn't come back into focus until she's perched on a gurney, the plastic rim of a nebulizer pressed against her mouth.

"Here," Hayes offers breathlessly, using his free hand to grasp her fingers to guide them to the device, "got it?"

Her own panic must be stamped across her face because he stays put, ensuring she has it handled.

"One puff...in...out…" he encourages, "another…"

She feels his hands bracket her knees as she breathes in the medication, the clack of the valve tapping rhythmically against the plastic. The rhythm matches the gentle oscillation of his thumbs over the ridge of her knees and she feels her breaths instinctively matching the motion.

Slowly, her breathing begins to stabilize and the tight, corseted feeling in her chest alleviates.

Crisis averted. Add one to the nearly croaked it tally.

"You're getting some color back," Hayes observes.

Whether it's the sheer panic or the adrenaline that crashes once she realizes she's safe, she collapses into his shoulder as a quiet cascade of albuterol tremors washes over her.

His hand settles on her back, scooping her hair out of the way to smooth a warm friction along the curve of her spine.

"Jesus. You can't keep scaring a bloke like this, Grey," he ushers into the shell of her ear.

She's too tired to even clap back, but the jolt of her ribcage against his lets him know that she at least finds it borderline funny.

"Thank...you," she manages to croak out.

"Anytime."

She pulls away a few moments later, a stitch of embarrassment threading through her gut over her barefaced vulnerability. She should be used to it by now considering how her deepest tragedies have often played out in the hospital's public forum.

This whole charade will have some sort of fallout.

Namely, a lot of Irish clover texts from Switzerland; she hasn't heard the end of Hayes' parking-lot heroics.

Which reminds her.

"Do you have some sort of notification system?" she asks him through a cough.

His brow knits in confusion, "come again?"

"You just seem to have some good timing is all...parking lots and lounges."

She knows it clicks when he manages his own hitched laugh.

"No, I just finished a pyloromyotomy when Bokhee recruited me to check up on you - she was worried."

The day continues to surprise her.

"Don't look so surprised, this hospital worships you," he tells her, "you've got the whole place wrapped around your little finger."

"Hmm," she hums dubiously.

She doesn't realize she's staring until Hayes draws her out of her funk.

"What?"

_Can I test a theory?_

A feeble prickling of heat settles on her cheeks.

"Nothing, just thinking."

"About?"

"Sudoku."

The exam room echoes with his laughter.

"Aye, of course."

Right there she has a moment. To ask all of those fragmentary questions that she's been clinging onto.

But mainly, _why_?

She thinks he does too, maybe. If she looks deep enough. Although, he does a much better job of masking whatever it is so she's not completely sure.

It's unnerving.

She opens her mouth to ask but the cosmic joke the universe makes of her life shatters the opportunity the moment the exam room door bursts open.

Deluca's entrance thaws the moment.

"Mer, are you okay?!"

"She's alright," Hayes confirms, rising back to his feet, "just a bad asthma attack but it's under control now."

She knows that neither are fond of one another, but they're as amicable as their egos will allow considering her situation.

"Grey," Hayes nods, then turns to leave to allow her some privacy with Andrew.

Her final thank you falls just before the exam room door closes and suddenly she feels entirely exposed. Andrew takes Hayes' spot and his hands map the same route over the arch of her knees, gently squeezing to imbue a sense of comfort.

"Schmidt said Hayes ran you through the hospital. Said you looked half-dead."

And so spins the rumor mill.

"I'm fine, _really_ ," she assures, reaching her own hand out to squeeze his shoulder, "I forgot my inhaler today. _Really_ dumb move on my part."

She hopes her renewed energy will convince him enough to withdraw the concern.

"I should have been there. What if -" he trails off, as panicked as she or Hayes had been during her ordeal.

Out of an old reflex, she drifts her hand over the curve of his jaw and cradles it, "it's not your job to worry about me anymore, Andrew."

He's grown enough to know she doesn't mean it to be unkind, but even so, the disappointment it arouses in him is enough to make her feel wretched.

"I know. I left that ball in your court," he sighs, sensing the direction that she has them coursing.

_She can be whoever she wants to be to me._

_Deluca. What is he to you?_

They never really had that closure, did they? Implicit or explicit, it's far kinder to know where you stand. God knows she's been left in the lurch enough to know that anyone deserves better than that. To pine and wallow in a state of unknowing is enough to send anyone into the bay.

Cut. Suture.

"You're a better person without me, Andrew. Look at you - you always have been."

Cold comfort, not the easiest to swallow but it's _something_.

He knows it and she knows it.

"I just didn't want you to think I didn't care."

She smiles.

"There's a fine line between caring and _caring_."

If you ask her later, she'll admit to the sting of letting him go. A first that she will never get back.

More eyes than she's used to follow her to the parking lot, making sure that she makes it to her car without kissing the ground.

The day is all but ready for her to leave behind with her foot on the gas pedal. Back to Facetime parenting and begging her children to try and refrain from sending their aunt to a psych ward.

_Amelia:_

_Five new messages._

_1 Voicemail._

She's a dead woman.

If not for the familiar face that passes in her rear-view mirror, she might have been home earlier to prevent the sixth call.

_No is an easy two-letter word._

But only if you mean it.

...

_His Irish lilt thickens on the third shot of tequila._

_"Can I test a theory?"_

_The way he looks at her jolts her like the brush of a fingertip along an electric fence._

_"What kind of theory?"_

_The curve of a lip._

_"Of firsts."_

_A climactic thrumming of her heartbeat whooshes in her ears._

_"You know you can't take it back?"_

_A beat._

_"I know."_

_His breath is warm against her skin._

_And then she's a first._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you made it this far, congrats. Also, things are about to get spicy.


	3. Rainier & Sunday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Insert Meredith Grey iconic moment voice* “I make no apologies for how I chose to [write lengthy characterisation and introspection].” 
> 
> Happy New Year and 2021, everyone! As my gift to you, please take this extraordinarily rambly chapter that I couldn't slice down for the life of me. If you don't know me or my works by now, you'll soon learn that I do quite love some introspection. There was a little rejig this chapter, not that it should detract from your enjoyment. I also try and infuse some medical terms and show-type reality but please, for the love of god, I am not a professional and all of my medical suggestions would probably kill patients. 007 up in here, move over George. So please take it with a grain of salt, aha.
> 
> I just wanted to say a big thank you to all of the people who have been so lovely with their thoughts and comments. Pulling off these chapters is long and arduous, but to see the joy it's bringing people is sending me so...grazie.

**_Permanence_ **

_“He’s more myself than I am; whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” - Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights._

**Rainier**

*

He’s always felt unassailable at great heights.

Beyond the reach of pagers and cell reception, the racket of the city and the turbulence of life’s scruples. 

It’s a feeling he’s chased since scaling the peak of Corrán Tuathail in the spring of ‘95, three sheets to the wind on Roisin and Tadhg’s stolen _Smithwicks._ The tang of malty hops still lingers on his tongue at the memory, barely seventeen and completely unprepared for the lightning strike of invincibility that clobbers him above MacGillycuddy’s Reeks.

As his ambitions and horizons grow, as do the trails and peaks he scales. The Reeks are mere pebbles compared to the likes of Mount Shasta and The Maroon Bells once he’s stateside, but Abigail indulges his fondness for the small massif on their Irish honeymoon a decade later. They’d traded the _Smithwicks_ for a flask of hot toddy, clamoring for sips under a curtain of drizzling precipitation. Somewhere on the descent to Loch Gourach he shows her how to build a cairn, cementing a tradition that weaves through the next decade and down to their sons.

It’s no wonder he finds himself turfing the boys to Switzerland and nestling them between the Jura and the Alps. His Boston co-workers had balked when he asked for a transfer to Zurich, 3700 miles from any connections or support networks. Not to mention their ladles of concern over the quadrilingual divide and Klausmann’s lofty recruitment standards. _Biting off more than you can chew_ , that was the sentiment they lauded upon him. At the time it wasn’t as though he really knew what he was doing, and it’s only after the dust settles that he knows he was just looking for an escape exit. 

Cut and run. 

It all boils down to two options: Galway or Zurich. 

Home to Ma and Saoirse or into the void. 

The day his formal offer from Klausmann drops into his inbox he books flights to Switzerland. It takes him a week to break it to his Ma and the boys don’t speak to him for three days. 

_Mom would hate you!_

Despite the kaleidoscopic maelstrom of grief the answer was _so_ clear to him: somewhere he could feel as close to her as much as he could run from her memory. A world away from her crocheted cancer pillows and the bohemia of her art cohort, but not so far from the cairns and peaks sewn into their history.

And, well, the rest is a long and sordid tale of survival and assimilation. Regrets? He thinks he walks away from that unscathed or at least unpunished; they find a semblance of a good life in Europe.

Zurich keeps them afloat.

But Washington guides them home.

The din of Seattle withers to a background static until it’s commandeered by the susurrus of alpine leaves and the graceless trudging of hiking boots. _Rainier._ He’d made plans with Abigail and wrecked them several times over because of scheduling conflicts and last minute art exhibitions. Trivial things when he thinks back on it, because here he is, finding the time in the middle of a bloody pandemic. 

The first free weekend on his schedule without the condition of on-call he pushes through a Covid test and rallies Austin and Liam for the hike. He misses them something chronic, even while they’re wading through the ages of biting commentaries and anti-parent agendas. 

A few thousand feet above sea-level coupled with the lack of cell reception, the trails are one of the only places he can get them away from screens and social media long enough to have meaningful conversation. Andrea has already looped him in on Liam’s recent dating saga and he’s fully prepared for some kind of fallout.

Little does Andrea know the irony of his situation. 

_You can’t take it back._

_I know_.

A fragmented waltz between him and Grey that combusts from the fuel of tequila and whatever Richter-scale level of tension that ebbs between them. That’s not something he can shrug off with the rest of the baggage that he leaves at the base of the mountain. Or anywhere, really. What he _can_ hide is swept under a layer of blasé Irish charm and an increase in Peds surgical cases. 

That isn’t to say that they’ve left it awkwardly suspended. 

Just... _when you’re ready._

The internal war that rages isn’t the one he expects to be wrestling with. He knows enough from Abby’s trashy dramas and PBS specials that _relief_ isn’t something he should be experiencing. The world doesn’t fall out from underneath him and the recognition that he hasn’t kissed his _wife_ isn’t a catalyst for the end of his daring move. 

Surely _that_ should elevate him to win the worst widow award?

Grey doesn’t dwell on it in the aftermath, but he can sense her silent scrutiny in lounge passings and bumps in the hospital corridors. Timing and schedules aren’t as forgiving following her exit from his hotel room and they come to exist in a state of limbo - even if it’s unintentional on his part. Her? He doesn’t know, but it’s not radio silence between them and for that he’s glad. To the rest of the world the seismic shift between him and the general surgeon goes undetected. Or as much as he can assume it does from the quiet and unremarkable interactions he has with her sisters and friends within the hospital. 

If not for the uptick in his pulse any time he side-steps her in the halls, stirring a vivid recollection of his thumb tracing the hinge of her jaw, he’d be hard pressed to believe any of it himself. 

“Da! Look at this cairn!”

Austin’s interception is a welcome distraction and he notches up his pace to clear the next incline where the boys have trekked ahead. 

“Nothin’ we haven’t seen before,” Liam warns him, a purposeful volume to his snipe that sets off a clapback from Austin. 

“Probably what Gianna said about _you_ , Liam.”

He steps in before Liam’s temper hits boiling point and leaves him saying something he’ll regret. 

“Tone it down - the _both_ of you - you whine more than some of my preemies.” 

He’s been battling the teenagers’ moods since they rose for breakfast and he’s had just about enough of it. It’s an exercise in his restraint; underneath it all, they’re just two kids looking for some attention and for him to take the time to unpick the barbed wire. 

Better the deep end than the slow and torturous build up. 

“So what’s all the fuss about this lass?” he ventures, leading them round a hairpin in the trail, “ _Gianna_ is it?”

“ _Da_ ,” Liam groans in that disgruntled teenage way of his, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Yeah, and instead of talking you’re reacting - the whole house is feeling it, Liam. You snapped at your Aunt and you’re being pissy with Austin. So either you reign it in or we talk about it.”

_Watch Liam’s temper._

He pauses on the trail, hands firmly planted in his pockets with the intention of staying put until Liam makes his decision. 

“She’s his lab partner,” Austin interjects, stoking the fire once again. 

_Boys_.

“Funny, Liam said that without his lips moving,” he quips over to Austin, “give your brother some space and go and find some rocks for Mum’s cairn.”

“Aye, Da.”

“Good lad.”

Liam’s ire peters off enough that he’s able to wait for Austin to trudge further up the trail before throwing his two cents in. 

“You _always_ let him get away with it.”

“And what am I letting him get away with?” he challenges Liam, “because your Aunt didn’t have a good report on you this week and I don’t remember coming down on you for it. It’s about picking and choosing your battles and that’s something you’ve got to start learning.”

Liam screws his face up and he braces himself for one of two polar swings. 

His sons aren’t sods by any means and on the whole he’s deeply proud of the men they’re becoming, but puberty is one fickle hellion. Now that Liam’s growth spurt shoots him an inch or two below his own six-foot frame, his looming stance does nothing to assert a sense of authority. They’ve reached the milestone of having to dig deep and have those important conversations. He’s Mum and Da now, and the two years that precede Abigail’s passing missile him through a new crash course on parenting. 

His Ma helps, she’s made him the man he is today and Abigail rarely found fault with the advice she was willing to give. His only hope is that he’s implementing it right and not fucking them up along the way. God knows he’s made some rash decisions since 2017. 

“Come on,” he takes the first step and pulls a reluctant Liam in for a hug, “this year’s been a bit mental hasn’t it?”

All of Liam’s clenched-jaw fire suddenly fizzles out and he slumps into the hug with a defeated sigh. 

“I miss Mom.”

“Aye, I know you do,” he sniffs, holding his son tighter, “there isn’t a day I don’t think about her either.”

It’s their struggle but it’s not their excuse.

“You’ve got your tools, Liam. Mum’s letters. The albums and videos. You pick up your damn phone and I’ll call or text you as soon as I’m free. You’re my top priority _every_ time. If you need advice on a lass you know where I am.”

“ _Da_ ,” Liam pulls away with another groan. 

“ _Da_ me all you want, I convinced your Mum didn’t I?”

“Still.”

“Your entire existence is owed to my decision to steal 500 pens; ingenious.”

“Gianna needs her pen.”

“Now you’re just being a smart aleck.”

Liam smirks then. “A bit.” 

“If you really don’t want to talk about it that’s fine, but don’t forget to keep yourself in check. You need to apologise to your Aunt and lay off Austin.”

The last part draws another scowl from the teen.

“I’ll tell him the same thing,” he promises.

They continue further along the trail at a meandering pace, allowing Liam a few more quiet moments before re-joining with Austin. He spies his other son sifting through rocks along the trail edge, keeping a far enough distance from the slope opposite. 

“Mom would have liked it here.”

He sucks in a breath of fresh Rainier air and nods, “you know she’d have you boys collecting wildflowers to press.”

“We can still grab some for Aunt Andrea.”

“She’d like that.”

And just like that he has his two hellions plucking alpine chickweed and rabbitbrush bouquets. As the afternoon settles in they find a good vantage point for a cairn in Abigail’s memory. He spends a good hour with the boys balancing and ruining several attempts until they have a decent column of stones. 

“One more!” Austin declares, “it needs to be bigger than the one we built on Mount Rigi.” 

Hayes checks his watch. “Make it the last one, we still have the loop to finish.”

It’s only a moment. 

A freak accident that he couldn’t have predicted. 

Every time they hit the trails it’s a minute possibility, but in all the years they’ve spent on mounts it’s never happened to them. 

Until it does. 

The loose chunk of basalt hurtles down the mountainside at rapid speed and clips Austin on it’s path. 

“Austin!”

From cairn to his son’s side it takes him a split few seconds, Liam hot on his heels. 

“Da!”

His heart comes to reside in his throat and the surgeon in him takes over, channeling out Austin’s cries and Liam’s panic by isolating the injury. 

_Right dorsal radial laceration_. _No obvious breaks, radius runs intact on visual and under palpation. Doesn’t rule out a fracture._

“Liam, get my kit out of the bag.”

It takes longer than he expects and he snatches the bag from his eldest without apology, hell-bent on stemming the bleeding running in rivulets down Austin’s arm. He flushes and packs it to the best of his ability, apologising when Austin jerks and hisses in pain. 

“Worst part,” he warns, swabbing iodine over the jagged ridges of flesh. 

He can’t slap a bandaid on this. 

“I’m gonna be sick,” Austin warns. 

“Liam, give him your drink for the shock.”

Liam complies without argument. 

“You’re sure it didn’t hit you anywhere else?” he pushes Austin again, roving his hands over his son’s head and limbs to be absolutely sure.

“Just my arm, Da. I _told_ you.”

Alright. 

“Is he gonna be okay?” Liam’s murmur comes from behind him, leaden with worry. 

“Aye, looks worse than it is. But he’s gonna need stitches -,” he clicks his fingers in front of Austin’s face, distracting him from a mile-long stare at the bandage covering his wound, “think you can make it back to the car? I need to take you into work to get you stitched up.”

The nod is all he needs. 

Over time he’s learned how to tamp down the gut-churning fear that the boys stir up when they hit the deck. With one in a Swiss Ski club and the other an avid mountain biker his nerves were always destined to be fried. Whilst Enge sheltered them from the tragedy in Boston, it opened up opportunities and freedoms that he once deemed wildly reckless. If he was a softer touch he would have ignored Abby, made Austin stick to the piano and have him see it through. 

In hindsight, it would have saved him the tachycardia and four X-rays before the kid was twelve. If his self-serving guilt wasn’t enough, his Ma had an earful and a half for him whenever he managed a call while waiting for X-ray tech availability.   
  


_A amadáin!_

_Fool._

Nothing he hasn’t branded himself in the middle of ER visits and cast plasterings. 

They make it to the car and he double checks Austin’s bandage and gives him a water bottle to sip on. 

“Watch him, Liam.”

He maneuvers the rear-view mirror to cover Austin and feels a splice of tension ease off. At least they’re off the mountain in one piece and limbs mostly intact. If his assessment isn’t enough to satiate his anxiety over Austin’s welfare, the feud between the brothers half an hour into their drive to GSM speaks volumes. 

“ _Widerlich,_ Austin! Da told you to keep it covered!” Liam grouses from the rear passenger seat. 

“I’m just looking, _big mouth_!”

“Da, he’s being a moron.”

“If anyone expects a wifi password and pizza tonight the whining stops now. Unless you’re happy to stick to your 2GB data plans for the rest of the month?”

“No, Sir.”

“No, Da.”

_Hook. Line. Sinker._

“Then wise up. Austin, cover your arm back up before you invite staph in.”

The ER is the last place he wants to be taking his son, but his arm needs debriding, stitching and an antibiotic prescription written up. Nothing he can patch up at home or get away with treating himself on the Peds floor. The idea strikes him half-way to the hospital, but he doesn’t dare to action it until he’s coaxing Austin out of the car and onto the parking-lot tarmac. It’s a waste of her specialism and time, but he doesn’t quite trust anyone the way he trusts her...and this is his _son_. 

_Are you free? Need a favour._

He shamelessly taps out the request on his phone, then grabs his own mask from the console. 

“Mask on, Austin,” he urges his son with a nudge, “keep it on until we get back to the car, alright?”

“Fine, Da.”

“How’s the pain? One to ten?”

Austin shrugs, cradling his bandaged arm with a stifled grimace, “maybe a 5? I can manage.”

“Good lad,” he encourages, crouching down again to peer through to the rear passenger side, “Liam, I’ll text you when we’re done. Don’t leave the car.”

“Sure _.”_

_Ding_. 

_Grey_ :

_If it’s a requisition sign-off you can go to hell. Deadline was Tuesday._

Charming. 

Although, he’s relieved by her snark because it marks her administrative hours; he’s never known Grey more pissy than when she’s holed up in the board conference room wrestling with licensing and accreditation requests.

_Favour is for my kid. Can you meet me in the Pit?_

The little writing graphic starts and stops for a few oscillating moments, then pings through another message.

_On my way down._

“You remember Dr. Grey?” He turns to Austin then, tucking his cell into his pocket. 

“The twiggy lady?”

“She’s not... _twiggy_ ,” he rebuts, slightly affronted.

“Liam said she was.”

“Your brother has the vernacular of a seventy-year-old retiree, Austin. Until either of you can talk to girls without tripping over your feet you’re not allowed to make comments like that.”

“Why’re _you_ so bothered?” Austin’s tone shifts, running a little sharp for his liking.

It _is_ a valid question. 

“She owns the hospital and she can have me fired. That _and_ your Mum and I raised you better.”

He makes sure to fact-check himself after his first run-in with Grey. After nearly biting her head off on his first day and then learning he’d undercut the Chief of General Surgery, he’d felt more than a little shamefaced. It’s an embarrassment later compounded by the articles he finds: _Catherine Fox_ _award winner, a commendation from the Washington governor, in-flight brain surgery MacGyver_ … _a member of_ _the Seattle Grace Five_. 

Grey-Sloan _Memorial._

Little did he know at the time the venom he’d spat at the hospital’s darling. Yang’s _Twisted Sister_. 

_I can see why you were missed._

Yeah, his words definitely felt hollow after that night. 

Even so, a deeper part of him is validated that he gauges her before the slew of online commendations tip the balance of his personal favour for her. Over the year he’s slowly built up his connections at GSM, which was more than a mite difficult in the beginning once he’d steamrolled Grey. He doesn’t expect the glue and tape family they’ve made here, the deep connections that boil over the job roles and muddy the waters. But Grey has principles and grit beyond the average doctor - a maverick in her own right - and the metre of his respect for her takes a sharp upswing. 

So she becomes his compass, the person he can look to in order to gauge the rest. 

_You seem very interested in who Meredith Grey listens to._

He guides Austin through the bowels of the hospital after a scrap between the interns running the admittance tent. 

“It’s starting to sting,” Austin puffs through clenched teeth, cradling his arm a little more delicately.

He tucks Austin into his side and runs a hand over his son’s hair. “The adrenaline’s wearing off, we’re almost there, Pal. Promise.” 

The older his sons get the less they want the coddling affection from him, but no matter their age they’re always in need of that energy the moment something snaps or splices. It’d be misguided to say he enjoyed it, seeing the kids in pain, but being able to be there for them and comfort them in ways that he’d missed during his residency lessens the sting.

A new message pings on his cell.

_Bay three._

“Right, through here,” he urges, re-orienting Austin. 

He nods a quick hello to a passing orderly and brushes off an incoming intern request with a clear nod to his son. “I’m off-duty, Perez. See your resident.”

“Your doctor voice is so _weird_ ,” Austin notes, scrunching up his nose. 

“Well, people respect me here, unlike you scamps at home with your consoles and curfews.”

He finds Grey fighting off her own bedraggled intern by the time he hits the right bay with Austin. 

“ - take some initiative before wasting my time. _Go_.”

Those training requisitions must have been _lengthy_. 

“Got the claws out, Grey?”

She flips to face him with an immediate retort brewing on her lips, but she pauses and relents at the sight of Austin at his side. 

“Ass from elbow,” is all she mutters as she brushes past him and approaches Austin, suddenly a whirl of congeniality and concern, “what in the world has your Dad been getting you into? Can I take a look?”

Austin shrugs, looking up at him, “I guess?”

“Come on, hop up,” he encourages his son, helping him to hoist up onto the gurney with his one good arm, “Dr. Grey is doing us a favour so no attitude.”

“I wasn’t giving her attitude!” Austin snips back. 

“And I was _just_ warning you.”

Grey looks between them with her own smirk. 

_Teenagers_ he mouths at her over the top of Austin’s head.

“So is anyone going to tell me what happened?” she asks, donning a set of fresh gloves before attending to Austin’s bloody bandage. 

“I got hit by a rock,” Austin deadpans.

Christ. He’ll pull that one-liner for the next year. Just like _I fell off a cliff -_ except it was a five metre drop off a biking trail into brush. 

“We were on Rainier,” he offers up in explanation to Grey, “Austin was in the wrong place at the wrong time - less of an impact than it was a graze, thankfully. Still tore him up a bit.”

“Ouch,” she concurs, peeling away the last layer of cotton gauze.

A deep grimace settles over Austin’s face, “Da said it needs stitches.”

“Well, he’s not wrong,” she sighs, making a quick assessment of the injury being particularly careful not to elicit further pain. 

“The radius still seems intact but I couldn’t be sure, kept it strapped and elevated before Bear Grylls over here decided to tamper with it in the car.”

“Mhhm,” she hums, preoccupied with swabbing and cleaning the perimeter of the laceration, “it’ll need debriding and flushing again but I want to get him into X-ray just to be sure.” 

She addresses Austin then. 

“Is this a first or one of many?”

“One of many - I broke it last year.”

“Oh, so you’re a _serial_ bone breaker. What’s your poison? Football? Hockey? Or do you just spend your time dodging rocks?”

That garners a laugh from his son. He watches from the side-lines as she effortlessly begins to break through Austin’s gritty façade. 

“Mountain biking...so yeah, rocks and branches and bad landings.”

“So _you’re_ the person I need to send my son to when he thinks he can take on the skate park without a helmet?”

“Ouch,” Austin pretends to flinch, “bad idea.”

“Tell me about it.”

He texts Liam an update while Grey schedules Austin in on the X-ray list. 

_Might be another hour. Can you manage?_

_Yh._

He chuckles. Liam has never minced his words since the day he started talking. 

“Carter can slot him in now,” Grey offers, appearing back at his side, “you can come with if you can find something clean to wear.”

He looks down at the bloody mess on his shirt from Austin’s accident. 

“Yeah, that might be an idea; if you give me five I can grab something from my office.”

“We’ll walk slow,” she offers, “that or you’re free to sit here and show Trent how to place a central line.”

He eyes the flailing intern in the opposite bay with disdain, “I’ll sprint.”

“Good choice.”

When he catches up with them again he finds Austin motor-mouthing Grey through the ins and outs of the UCI World Championships. From the knit of her brow it’s clear he’s speaking a foreign language to her, but she has the grace and patience not to let her guard slip. He doesn’t make his presence known straight away, content to hold off a few moments to watch the two navigate their animated conversation. 

The laugh his son elicits from her is as balming as any shot of Ireland’s best.

And there, in between the phlebotomy stockroom and X-Ray 2, he finds himself relinquishing whatever cover he uses to disguise the fact that he’s so damn _attracted_ to her. Sure, it seems obvious and late in the game to be admitting that considering he’d bulldozed that pretense a couple of weeks before. Back to when he _literally_ had his tongue in her mouth, peppered up on drabs of _Cuervo_ and a suddenly volcanic bravado. 

He knew it then as much as he feels it now, but this is the first moment he can truly allow himself to own it. Without reservation or a boot full of guilt stomping on his sternum. 

Two and a half lustless years reset to zero. 

_You have my permission._

His quiet epiphany lasts all but a few seconds until he’s being coaxed to the other end of the corridor by Austin.

“Da, we’re going in.”

“Aye, I’ll be right there.”

He tucks himself into the nearest desk chair in the viewing station once Carter begins to prep Austin, the removal of his buffer leaving a chasm between him and Grey. Except for a quick consult on one of her patients the week before, this is the longest moment he catches with her since he tossed all restraint out of the window. Determined not to let the elephant in the room overstay its welcome he fishes for a quick wisecrack, but she’s already ahead of him and a touch more decent. 

“Are you okay?”

That’s a loaded question with a lot of overtones and undertones and he’s not quite sure how to answer it.

But she has that covered too.

“My eldest busted her knee once and I almost needed sedating.” 

Right, _that_ side of okay. 

For now he’s still surviving on dregs of adrenaline and half a bottle of electrolyte drink, it’ll come crashing down later once Austin is back home and sassing Liam. The closeness of it all. A near miss.

“Aye, he’s a tough nut. No idea where he gets it from,” he jests, using a foot to circle his view in time to catch her eye roll. 

Her monitoring of Austin through the viewing glass pauses and she brings herself to swing her own chair around, facing him. “He’s a sweet kid. _Terrifying_ , but sweet.”

“You’ve got a few years before all of this, eh? How old is your eldest?”

“Almost nine.”

“Savour it while you can,” he warns, “the next thing you know they’re flinging themselves off mountains and ski jumps rather than the bottom stair - and they have the _nerve_ to wonder where my hair went.”

_Gotcha._ His words spark a familiar peel of laughter and the room suddenly feels a few degrees warmer. 

“ _Your_ hair though, the little side-braid thing...it’s nice.”

That earns him an impish smile and a moment of pause. It’s never been easy to unnerve her, but he finds himself catching her resolve a little more frequently than usual. 

She visibly relaxes, the pinched tension in her shoulders dropping, “so you’ve not been running for the hills?” 

“I suppose not...not in the way I expected - does that make me a bad widow?” 

It’s the one question he isn’t sure he wants the answer to, from her or from anyone. He senses truth in her reply and not the judgment that has plagued his mental cinema. 

“I don’t think there’s a guide book on this sort of thing...just experience and trial and error.”

Time to be brutally honest. 

“You make me nervous, Grey.”

“I do?” she furrows her brow while challenging him from behind those sharp, green eyes, “you don’t act like it.”

“Aye, you do. It’s not...you know that wasn’t just a checkbox right?”

“It wasn’t?”

He’s surprised, if not a little sore at her response.

“No, and I’m sorry if it felt like that,” he apologises, rubbing his brow, “bloody hell, it’s been two years and no one, not a fancy or a second-look...and then I get here and…”

“And me?”

“And you,” he echoes, hoping his sincerity quashes whatever mixed signals he might have been leaving in his wake. It’s been eighteen years since he’s had to worry about anything like this. 

She continues to surprise him. 

“It didn’t feel like that. A checkbox.”

He’d be a lesser man if he couldn’t admit to the tachycardic beat that stirs in his chest at her response. Maybe she sees it for the first time in him then, the ruddy flush on his neck and the way he tamps his palms on his knees. 

She thaws him. 

“Look, I don’t want to give Yang anything to gloat about - god knows her head can’t get any bigger -,”

“Sunday,” she cuts him off, wrestling her own nerves, “we don’t have to do the _thing,_ I mean, we’ve already had a _thing_...I’m with my kids after today but I’m heading back to the hotel Sunday evening. After dinner.”

“That’s...yeah, I can do Sunday.”

Their paper-thin plan is all they can manage before Carter brings Austin back into the fray, ending the moment. He reigns himself back in as much as she does, returning to their lukewarm cordiality in front of his son. 

Just as Grey finishes his last stitch Austin decides to play with fire. 

“Da?”

“Mhhm?”

“Lei molto carina.” 

_She’s really nice._

He sees Grey’s smile buoy over the edge of her mask. He’s warned Liam and Austin about using their languages to hide thoughts in plain sight. Not that he can argue with the sentiment he tries to express discreetly. 

He scuffs the boy's hair. 

“Lei parla Italiano.” 

_She speaks Italian._

Austin dares a glance at the general surgeon, half-expecting him to be pulling a prank, but Grey quashes it with a chuckle. 

“Sì lo faccio.”

_Yes I do._

His son ripens like a tomato; if it weren’t so comical he’d feel sorry for the poor lad. But when they get back to the car that isn’t the story Austin tells. 

“Liam! Da _likes_ someone.”

  
  
  


_*_

**_Sunday_ **

*

Threes and sevens. 

The surgical floor’s equivalent to Friday the 13th. 

Of all the superstitions to survive the car-wreck that was her surgical intern year, it’s the embedded belief that all surgical fatalities come in _threes_ and _sevens_. That and she might also feel inclined to suffocate anyone who utters the words “quiet board.” Otherwise, she would consider herself a hereditary skeptic; part and parcel of being the daughter of Ellis Grey.

The cascade begins at 5:07 am on her day off, already sleep-deprived from having to soothe a night terror and share her bed with her four-year-old. So when her cell vibrates on her nightstand - ripping her from sleep _and_ the possibility of time with her kids - she’s pissed.

_MVC GEN E MULT CONS TRAUMA._

She doesn’t know why she even bothered to unpack her hotel duffle. If not for one of the four house keys looped on her keychain she’d have a hard time arguing she owned her own damn house. 

The rest of her morning erupts in a flash of rushed childcare arrangements, apologies and assurances that she’ll mend the broken promises. Much like she remembers from her own childhood, there is only so much that the kids are willing to believe, and their disappointment and tears are something she’ll have to shoulder for the rest of the day. 

To top it all off the engine light in her car starts to blink as she pulls up in the parking lot.

Suffice to say, she feels certifiably _crappy_ once she hits the Pit.

“Mer, two more incoming - intake confirmed abdominal evisceration in one. Ortiz is running PRBC.”

Jackson throws her a gown and before she can even change to scrubs the second wave of patients comes rolling in.

The ORs become revolving doors snatching and spitting out patients en masse. By midday, the fatality count on the surgical floor hits four and the rumblings start circling. Interns and residents scramble to hand out juju tea and she has a particularly difficult time getting Helm to take the hint and shove off. 

She doesn’t want weak superstition caffeine. She wants patients that aren’t going to code on her table. 

The pandemic doesn’t take a day off; while their staffing levels have recovered since the peak of infection, isolation and tracing efforts have skimmed enough from the team that they never recover to full staffing capacity. Her own department plummets by three and when Owen and Amelia need her on two separate surgeries she has to bring it down to the vitals. 

Hunt’s patient loss may as well be her own. 

That brings them to five. 

The final three patients from the seven-car pile up at least make it to ICU, but not without the assignment of a resident and an intern to monitor obs throughout the next 24 hours. No attending will admit it, but the power of seven grips the floor and no one wants to be the scapegoat for the headlines the next morning. Or the star of the upcoming morbidity and mortality conference. 

Back to back surgeries take their toll and coffee is a weak substitute for sleep, by the time she rips off her scrub cap she’s resigned to finding an on-call room and crashing for as long as patient stability will allow. It takes her three attempts to find a free cot; distance restrictions limit them to two staff per room and the top bunks are taped off or stripped to prevent gathering. Policy dictates that they go home when they can - especially for on-call staff - but she has the car thing and she’s scheduled for an early morning the next day anyway.

No one is missing her. The kids have already eaten dinner and Link has the bedtime routine down to an art - so what’s the point?

And then, just as she’s feeling the pull of sleep, the on-call room door opens and jerks her back to focus. Back to an endless carousel of exhaustion and bleary-eyed frustration. 

She blinks, unfocused by the sudden light source.

_Andrew._

“Oh, sorry, I’ll find another one. My bad.”

“There aren’t any others,” she grumbles, squinting at him from over the starchy hospital blanket, “Hunt pulled in the entire intern group to cover trauma.”

“Still, there’s a half-decent couch in the attendings lounge.”

How does she continually find herself in these kinds of predicaments? A widowed mom-of-three in her forties? Honestly, she thought the whole awkward and fumbly aspects of dating would be like smoke in the wind. 

Andrew doesn’t deserve to tackle her bad mood but it’s the sleep deprivation doing the talking for her now.

“Can we not make this weird? There’s a bed. Take it.”

He knows her well enough that she doesn’t need the back and forth. The splinter of light behind him cuts off from the closing door and she hears him shuffling over to the spare bed, heaving a tired sigh. His day has probably been about as bad as hers.

“Did your patient survive?”

The smallest part of her curiosity demands it. 

“Barely,” he confirms over the creaking springs of his cot, “Parker and Perez are on obs. I don’t think she’ll make it through the night.”

“Oh.”

_Six._

“Yeah. Too much internal damage.”

_Internal damage._ A phrase that has always haunted her despite being nothing but a basic piece of surgical vernacular. She’s said it and felt it too many times in her life and it’s far too easily applied to all of the intense, calamitous fragments that patch up her story. 

Andrew feels like internal damage. 

The only difference being that she doesn’t need the ICU or extraordinary measures to heal it. Which is extraordinary in itself because he’s the first person since losing Derek that she could conceive being something... _permanent_. The guy her kids don’t mind and her sisters don’t hate. For a long while it all seemed fated and fixed. Until it didn’t. 

She does miss him in her own dark and twisty way. In ways that she misses the could-have-beens like Finn and Nathan; the passion and the romance without the domesticity of shared bank accounts and mortgages. Yeah, the sex was hot, _great_ even, and maybe the world did stop once or twice when she was with Andrew, but their dynamic was always fated for something else. 

_I’m not your partner. You didn’t just love Derek, you respected him._

She doesn’t like bringing it all back around to Derek, it’s not fair on Andrew by any means...but it’s Andrew who sows the seeds for her. Little does he know that his fear sparks the catalyst for her realization, swinging her back to her trial placebo switch and Lori Bosson’s brain tumor. Two career critical moments that should have ended her licence or her marriage. She spends a whole night looking up at her bedroom ceiling and playing out the biting memories that she’d long buried; the eviscerating silence, anger and her removal from neuro. 

The evolved part of her relationship with Derek where he had no issue punishing her for her transgressions. No conspiracy in her actions, or if he chooses to remain silent on certain aspects he makes sure to chew her out for it. Nothing like the ride-or-die, go-to-jail-for-you _idiocy_ she’d allowed Andrew to get away with. Even without his diagnosis or predilections, that is on _her_. Another unintended abuse of her position to ensure the work and life she’s clawed for isn’t ripped away from her. 

Though she rights it, the realization is clear: they are and will be at different stages for a long while.

And it was _hell_ with Derek. Intern versus attending. Resident versus attending. Unseasoned attending versus one of the world’s most _renowned_ neurosurgeons. His versus hers. Fighting for scraps from each other so they could both work at the top of their fields. He was the love of her life, but by god was it a bloody, vicious pathway.

Given hindsight and time, she doesn’t want that battle again.

And in the end it had killed Derek. 

The semi truck might have been the vehicle, but their careers and their power imbalance had been the fuel. If she had agreed to DC and Foggy Bottom, or forced his hand, he’d most likely still be here with her...and she has to live with that for the rest of her life.

But she doesn’t tell Andrew any of that. 

How could she?

Her only hope is that he finds it in himself to forgive her, if not learn from the terrible position she puts him in because of that inequality. He needs an equal and she can’t be that for him. 

Maybe he thinks she’s fallen asleep, or maybe he’s just testing the waters when he eventually breaks the silence, a whispered tenor floating through the dark. 

“I miss you.”

Like a scalpel to the jugular. 

“ _Andrew_ ,” her tone dips, honeyed with warning. The only saving grace of the moment being their separation in darkness. No face to gauge or expressions to keep in check. 

“I’m not asking for anything...just, I want you to know.”

“I can’t…” she swallows, anything else sitting like silt lodged in her throat.

“I know...it’s just going to take some time letting you go.”

“I’m sorry.”

His pause hangs in the air, weighted with their tattered history.

“Don’t be. _Really_. This is on me.”

That’s his truth and she has to live with that as well; they’re the risks she decides to play with the moment she bends to his advances. 

Much like the fire she’s currently dancing around with Hayes. 

_Shit._

She jolts upright in a panic. _Oh god._

As fast as she would prep for a code, she rips off the cot blanket and snatches her sneakers from the foot of the bed. It startles Andrew, and maybe he calls her name, but she’s not perturbed until he repeats it with a sharpened appeal. 

“ _Mer_?”

“It’s okay, I’m not tired,” she explains weakly, no energy left in her reserves to sound convincing as she checks the time on her phone screen, heart thumping. 

“Mer, I didn’t mean to make things-,”

“No, it’s not...it’s _fine_ ,” she assures him, looping one arm into her surgical coat, “get some sleep.”

If Andrew has any further appeal it falls on deaf ears as she traverses the corridor and slips into an empty room. _Sunday._ Her own voice echoes like a mantra in her head and she traps her bottom lip between her teeth, cell ringing against her ear. It’s one thing to stand up Link and Cece’s left-field matches, but it’s an entirely different thing to do it to _him_.

_Pick up._

“ _Grey_.”

For once maybe the universe _isn’t_ out to get her. 

“ _I was just about to knock on your door.”_

“Well, that’s why I’m calling - I’m not there.” 

“ _Cold feet_?” 

There’s something in his jest that calms her jitters, but also something that makes her want to punch him at the same time. 

“No...my feet are fine. Very warm, actually.”

He laughs then, unbridled.

But. There’s a but and she wants to admit it, except she’s finding it really hard to draw it out of herself. This is just another ruined fragment of her day, and one that she was - uncharacteristically - looking forward to. Plus, this is _his_ day. After all the side-stepping and waltzing around each other, giving breathing space to the cosmic crash that leaves the imprint of his mouth on hers seared into her memory, he’d found it within himself to _want_ to want her. 

“ _Everything okay?”_

“Not really,” she confesses as she perches herself on a lab table, falling into that increasingly frequent habit of not really being able to conceal her frustration, “it’s just this _ass_ of a day - I’m sorry.” 

“ _One for the shredder?”_

“Yeah,” she agrees, lacing her sigh with a breathy chuckle, “my kids hate me, my car’s on the blink and the ICU is full - we lost five today, maybe six in a few hours.”

“ _You’re not at home with the kids?”_

_“_ No, I’m in an empty phleb lab _._ On-call shift,"she adds by way of explanation.

_“Do you need a ride? I can come and get you if you’d rather be at the hotel.”_

It is the more logical choice given the only other option is an enclosed space with her latest botched life choice. Except, that’s not how she plays things - a lingering splinter that remains unfixed by therapy and the whole, happy and healed mantra. 

Always leave an out. 

“You don’t have to do that. I’m back here in the morning anyway.”

He knows she’s full of shit and it’s audible in his exaggerated puff of consternation. 

“ _You’re forgetting I’ve slept on those cots; prisoners have it better."_

_“_ And what would _you_ know about jail?"she challenges as burnt orange jumpsuits and floor puzzles flash in her peripheral. 

“ _Well, from one jailbird to another - I know enough._ ”

_Interesting._ She hasn’t heard that story yet. 

“I’m tired and cranky,” she warns.

“ _I’m not expecting a date, Grey. Just a friend offering to help out."_

That’s not...what she meant. Unlike most of the men she’s agreed to date, he doesn’t push. Ever. If her answer is no, he honours it. She’s not used to being served the same level of nonchalance. Oddly, it’s as thrilling as any brazen chase that she’s found herself in and it works against whatever composure she’s corralled together.

He doesn’t wait for her drawn-out response.

“ _Give me twenty minutes.”_

“Fine.” 

She ends the call on the façade of bristled annoyance, as though the curl of her mouth and the warm verve in her belly don’t exist.

No, she’ll keep that to herself for the time being. 

It’s only once she’s forced to look at herself in the attendings lounge mirror that the blind-rush morning catches up with her. Sweats, two mismatched socks and a pyjama top she mistook for her favourite lavender sweater. Whatever. This is who she is now. Long gone are the days of angry pink hair, low-rise jeans and slutty black dresses at bars. She’s aged just about as well as her Dartmouth tee that she had to stop wearing because of the disintegration. 

_Hayes_ :

_Parked in C Bay._

She dumps the Lexus keys in her tote and finishes off a text to her mechanic, stifling a yawn.

“Mer!”

Pulled from her screen she looks up to find Amelia jogging over. “Hey, you okay?”

“You still need a ride? Tom’s wrapping up and offered.”

“He _did_?” she asks, mildly astonished.

Amelia mirrors her sentiment, shrugging in that one-shouldered way of hers. Nobody really knows why Tom Koracick does anything he does, particularly when he’s being uncharacteristically kind. “Probably some weird, Covid survivorship favour. He has a soft spot for the scrappy ones.”

“Uh, no thanks,” she brushes off the offer, slipping her phone into her bag, “I’ve already got a ride.”

She senses the charge in curiosity almost immediately; scuttlebutt - like cockroaches, will survive way beyond her years.

“With _who_?” Amelia balks.

Her shoulder hitches, the sliver of a coy smile breaching the corner of her mouth. 

“Someone with a car.” 

It’s all she allows before taking one, two steps and circling on her heel.

“Mer?!”

“Night, Amelia!”

“You’re a bad sister!”

Her amusement lingers on her cheeks as she crosses the parking lot and beelines for the black Audi in C bay. So much so that even Hayes is surprised by her change of mood as she slides in the front passenger seat. 

“You’re looking chipper for someone who just came from the graveyard. Did someone rise from the dead in the last thirty minutes?” 

“Mmh? Oh, just a run in with my sister.”

“Pierce?” he asks as she grabs for her seatbelt. 

“No, Amelia.”

Same difference these days. 

“Right, the _complicated_ in-law.”

“This is _nice_ ,” she side-steps the fact that he remembers her whiskey grumblings, admiring the interior of his Audi.

“I don’t know,” he challenges her observation, glancing over at her, “that Lexus looks like it cost a fair penny.”

She shrugs, upping his climate control as they peel out of the parking lot. “Don’t be fooled. My car has an army of goldfish crackers in between the seats and more fingerprints than an FBI database.”

“Yeah, we waited until Austin grew out of his Funyuns phase before upgrading again.”

That reminds her. “How is he?” 

“Proud as punch” he smirks, then reaches into his console to pass her his cell, “he’s threatening to use it for his Google Classroom profile.”

Her own laugh bubbles over at the image of Austin brandishing his laceration for the camera. 

“How are they _so_ fearless?”

“Probably the whiskey we put in their bottles as babies.”

“I -”

“That’s a _joke_ , Grey.”

He makes it easy for her, the conversation and atmosphere, possibly out of his own self-preservation. She rarely sees him like this, plain-clothed and care-free. Prudish isn’t a word you’d find in her vocabulary, and that shows itself in the way that she subtly eyes him from the slanted angle that she maneuvers into.

Cristina doesn’t send her something she’d ever imagine returning because of the _cosmetic_ side. Which is _maddening_. Superficiality isn’t one of her traits - a recovering vapid narcissist, yes - but by the god she doesn’t believe in, she can certainly appreciate a _well-wrapped gift_ when it’s sat driving next to her. 

She tries to fight the avalanche, she really does. The carousel that is her life never stops. Not for break ups, kids or community service, nor for medical board trials or jail time. There is so much on her plate at any given time and most of it is messy and complicated. 

She wasn’t looking for _anything_. 

But _she’s_ the one who arms herself with tequila and high-jumps over the barrier. Granted, she wasn’t _intending_ to entangle herself up in him or vice versa, but it wasn’t exactly risk-free. Truthfully, if she was looking for someone to replace Alex or Cristina, she wasn’t ever going to pick the one with the Irish accent and a snark that increasingly feels like verbal foreplay. 

They sink platonic the moment he gives her an out and she doesn’t pull away. 

“I can hear your mind ticking from over here.”

She doesn’t have to look at him to feel his eyes on her. If she sticks to watching the world fly by in the window she won’t crack the obvious tension crammed between them.

“I’m just wondering why your car smells so good.”

He laughs again.

“Well, it was supposed to be a parting gift, but you can have it now, _bloodhound_ \- it’s on the backseat,” he gestures, not taking his eyes off the road. 

She reaches around and loops her fingers through the handles of a familiar take-out paper bag.

“Pinnochio’s _?_ ”

“Aye, all I had to do was mention your name. Giorgio told me to tell you he put extra parmesan on the fettucini...oh, and let me get this _exactly_ right: _ma non perdiamoci di vista, capisci cosa intendo_? You pissed him off, Grey.”

“I had _Covid_!” she exclaims, affronted. No one chooses a _Pinnochio’s-_ less life. Especially not with her Poptart cuisine cooking skills.

“Yeah, well, muggins here had to talk him down; he thought you were dead.”

“Now that’s _dramatic_.”

“He’s Italian. Also, you hadn’t ordered in a month.”

Giorgio really decided to call her out like that.

“That’s...none of your business.”

“You say that...but then he yelled at _me._ ”

“Why?” She doesn’t really need to ask him, Giorgio has a little bit of a paternal streak that he covets for the sister-wives, but it’s good to see him squirm. 

“He told me he has brothers - hey, why are you laughing? I went to do a _nice_ thing for a tired coworker and now I’ve got the Washington mob after me. Chivalry really _is_ dead.”

Once she starts laughing she just can’t stop. 

The tonic of Italian carbs warm in her lap and company that feels like fresh air seemingly cures the draining exhaustion caused by her crappy day. As they near the block to the hotel it feels a little too quick to end. All she has waiting for her on the other side of her hotel room door is a load of unfolded laundry and leftover departmental overtime requests. Slowly, the deflation creeps back in. 

She looks over at him again, noting the way he taps his index finger on the steering wheel to the beat of the radio. What is she _doing_? Cristina sent him on a silver platter and here she is finding some sort of pathetic, lame excuse to blow him off. For what? Because she’s scared of getting her feet wet again? Or is it him? The fact that she knows exactly where he is, or where his heart is. The pain that comes with blending the what was with the what could be? 

That’s all she’s worried about since she left his hotel room. The depths that she pushed him to, whether she pushed too far and too quick. 

But then he texts her the next morning like his sky hasn’t fallen. 

_You make me nervous, Grey._

She might have left the ball in his court, but it’s on her to let him know it’s okay to risk the step. To chase that first without the threat of being crushed. 

_Live for you Meredith._

“Don’t.”

It slips from her before she can overthink it. 

“Don’t what?” he asks, brow pinched. 

Deep breath. “Don’t take me back yet.”

“You sure?” he asks, flicking on a turn signal in the opposite direction. 

“Just...take me for a ride.”

“Anywhere?”

She shrugs, letting the moment of spontaneity settle over her.

“Surprise me.”

So he does, no questions asked about her sudden change of mind. 

A half hour later they end up on a ridge overlooking Discovery Park, sharing a container of fettuccine and calamari fritini against the hood of his car. 

He tells her about the time he was arrested for property damage to Wilkes and Boon’s tech booth, a hot-headed decision that led to him swinging a baseball bat at their demo model. The blind rage that almost cost him his job before Klausmann. 

She tells him about her stint in jail and the surgeon she inadvertently killed at her medical board trial, that she doesn’t feel sorry in the slightest. 

This might be their common darkness and maybe they find comfort in each other because of that, but there’s something else there. 

A way of thinking and processing that ripples underneath all of their life choices. They say opposites attract, that they create beauty in the chaos. But she also thinks there’s something to be said for two people cut from the same cloth. A ready-sutured intimacy that winds the path of least resistance. Everything with him runs so smoothly and it's not something she's used to. 

“There’s still this niggling feeling that it shouldn’t be this easy, y’know?” he tells her, staring out at the calm surface of Elliot Bay as though he's read her mind. 

“Easy? I don’t make anything easy,” she confesses, holding back a self-deprecating scoff, “and you don’t have to do the schmaltzy thing and say I don’t. I’ve never been able to change. It’s caused me a lot of trouble in my life.”

“Yeah, you can be a pain in the ass,” he teases, stealing the last calamari fritini.

“So can you," she retorts, snatching half back.

“Not denying it.”

“I didn’t get easy after Derek, every step forward was a landmine and some of them really blew up in my face. If you’d offer me easy now, I’d take it with both hands and run.”

He’s pensive for a moment, internalising. Maybe she said the wrong thing, but she’s not going to start lying to him now. 

“It was different with Abby, we knew she was terminal for a long time - and she prepared. I couldn’t stand it back then, the talk of life after her,” he exhales, a pause, “she had a plan for almost everything. The kids. Schools. Her sister. The house. Would you believe me if I told you that she gave me bloody _permission_ to move on?”

She doesn’t know if she could survive that. It really speaks to the man he is now, not jaded or twisted by the cruelty of it all. No, despite it, he finds it in himself to heal babies and volunteer for pro bono surgeries, tea and coffee at her beck and call. Someone like her, who takes it all and moulds it into something more bearable. 

“Maybe she knew that’s what I needed...for something like this. For _you.”_

When he looks at her this time she doesn’t look away, enamoured by his strength and resilience. That he’s willing to wade through all that pain and discovery just for a shot with her. She'd spent so much time with Andrew debating equality and stewing over power imbalances...and here Cormac Hayes comes barrelling in, crashing into her at the exact same juncture of life. And yeah, she's a _first_ or two ahead of him, but they're not permanent roadblocks. 

_I've never known someone like me._

What’s one more leap into the unknown? 

"You know you make me nervous too?" she concedes, buckling under his cobalt scrutiny. 

He shifts closer, tentatively breaching the last few inches between them. Her breath hitches - trapped by the inertia of expectancy. One, two seconds of delicate pause until memory bleeds into reality. The sanding of his jaw against her skin elicits the thundering in her pulse, rushing in her ears as loud as the water against the bay. It's instinctive and ardent, the way he melds into her languidly, then fiercely. A full-speed crash that splinters to her fingertips grafting along the underside of his jaw; more potent than any shot of morphine or spirit. 

She didn't expect this.

She didn't _want_ this.

But now...now she'll fight for it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Italian that a translating website advised was definitely correct but probably isn't:
> 
> * ma non perdiamoci di vista, capisci cosa intendo? = But don't be a stranger, you understand? 
> 
> Giorgio is a peripheral character I definitely didn't expect to ever come to love, but here I am imagining him yelling at Hayes as he tries to order Meredith's usual.
> 
> I also have this headcanon that Cormac made sure Austin & Liam picked up a language in Switzerland. Austin excels in Italian and Liam is better at German. Just a tad of background that didn't make it into the story by ways of specificity.

**Author's Note:**

> So, hello Richard Flood/Cormac Hayes - you brought some old fans back into the fray. Kudos, mate.


End file.
